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Angels Were Way Ahead of the Trade Deadline

The Angels sent four prospects to the Padres in exchange for reliever Huston Street.Credit
Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images

BALTIMORE — The closer thrives on responsibility. His job, almost always, is to preserve the work of his teammates. They give him a lead, he keeps it, and with enough victories the team plays into October.

So the closer on a bad team is not only extraneous, but also without a purpose. Such was life for Huston Street, whose 10-year career has mostly been a tour of West division also-rans. He has pitched for two playoff teams but felt the sting of losing in Oakland, Colorado and San Diego.

“Whatever team you’re on, you’re trying to make that team better and make them win,” Street said Wednesday in his new locker room, with the Los Angeles Angels. “But it’s the big leagues. There’s a realistic understanding that this is a talent league. Sometimes you look at a team and go, ‘Gosh, those guys are good.’

“And now I feel like I’m on that team, a team that really has a chance to do something special. And that, more than anything, is inspiring as a player. You get young again.”

This is the time of year when players like Street change their outlook in an instant. But as most teams scrambled to make deals before Thursday’s 4 p.m. deadline for trades without waivers, the Angels had already addressed their most pressing need — repeatedly, and with major impact.

In three trades between June 27 and July 18, General Manager Jerry Dipoto acquired three veteran relievers. He got Jason Grilli, an All-Star closer last season, from Pittsburgh for Ernesto Frieri; traded two prospects to Arizona for the left-handed specialist Joe Thatcher; and sent four prospects to the Padres for Street, who has quietly been baseball’s most reliable closer since 2011.

The Angels’ bullpen, which had a 4.36 earned run average through mid-June, has a 2.38 E.R.A. since then, through Wednesday’s 4-3 loss at Baltimore. Before Cory Rasmus allowed a game-ending homer to Manny Machado in the 12th inning on Tuesday, the Angels’ bullpen had stifled the Orioles for six innings, allowing just two singles and a walk.

Photo

Garrett Richards is part of a solid rotation for the Angels that is now supported by an improved bullpen.Credit
Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images

“As far as the depth that we have right now, you’ve got to go back quite a way to be able to match ’em,” said Mike Scioscia, the Angels’ manager since 2000. “I mean, you’re talking about Scot Shields and Frankie Rodriguez and Troy Percival, a whole slew of guys who really did a great job at the back end for us and were there at the same time. That gives us a real good feeling.”

Shields, Rodriguez and Percival were part of the 2002 Angels, who stormed through October to win the franchise’s only championship. Those Angels qualified as a wild card, behind the American League West champion Athletics, despite winning 99 games. Under the playoff format at the time, the wild card advanced directly to the division series.

These Angels have baseball’s second-best record (63-43), but again they trail the A’s, who are 66-41. And with two wild cards, the Angels, as it stands now, would face a one-game knockout round before even reaching the division series.

That unappealing reality lends urgency to each game, despite a comfortable cushion in the race simply to reach the postseason.

“I’d rather be the hunter than the hunted because coming down the stretch, sometimes teams wobble when they hear footsteps behind them,” said Grilli, who closed the Pirates’ wild-card victory in October.

“They know we’re not going away,” he added, referring to the A’s. “What’s going to be awesome is, we’ve got nine games left against them, and nobody wants to go in as a wild card because you work all year to get to the playoffs — and play a series. Do you want to win a division? Yeah, it weighs more heavily on that.”

The Angels rank second in the majors in runs per game (again, trailing Oakland), and their transcendent center fielder, Mike Trout, seems likely to win his first A.L. Most Valuable Player award. They also have a solid rotation, led by Garret Richards, Jered Weaver and C. J. Wilson, who is out with an ankle injury.

But the transformation of the bullpen, which ranked 26th in the majors last season in E.R.A., at 4.12, has turned the Angels from a good team into a dangerous one. It sent a strong message from the front office to the clubhouse.

Photo

Angels outfielder Mike Trout could win his first American League Most Valuable Player award. The Angels entered Wednesday with baseball’s second-best record.Credit
Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

“We’re trying to win,” Trout said. “The additions of the guys in the bullpen, they’re definitely making our team better. They’re great guys, and they’re ready to win. That’s all that matters.”

After spending lavishly on Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton and Wilson the previous two winters — and negotiating with Trout on an eventual six-year, $144.5 million extension through 2020 — the Angels made Joe Smith, a value purchase, their top priority in free agency last winter.

They got him with a three-year, $15.75 million deal, and Smith has delivered. A sinkerballer, he has retired his last 31 right-handed hitters and has allowed one earned run in his last 21 outings. When Smith overtook the slumping Frieri as closer in mid-June, he converted 10 saves in a row.

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Then came the arrival of Street, whose success rate in save chances (112 of 120, or 93 percent) is the best in the majors since 2011, with a minimum of 50 opportunities. Street bumped Smith back to a setup role — with Grilli, the rejuvenated Kevin Jepsen and the rookie Mike Morin — and he went without complaint.

“I don’t think I’ve been in a bullpen with this much turnover throughout a year,” said Smith, an eight-year veteran. “But it’s worked out. We’ve gotten extremely lucky with the guys we’ve brought in, not just how well they’ve thrown the ball, but the kind of guys they are. You’ve got seven guys sitting out there behind a wall, stuck out there by ourselves, and when you have camaraderie, it does mean a lot.”

Street said he had spoken with Smith about, as he put it, “the nuances of thought” — that is, the importance of results over pure stuff, the need to focus on nothing beyond the next pitch. It is standard theory for pitchers, but Street has fashioned an All-Star career with smarts and savvy rather than an overpowering arsenal.

Now, for the first time in years, he can channel that competitive drive into a pennant race. He enjoyed his time in San Diego and spoke highly of his teammates there. But the Angels are something different.

“The hardest part about being on a losing team is you have a job to do, and that job is only serving yourself,” Street said. “What makes it more fun to come to a winning team is, you feel like you’re serving others. You feel like you’re doing this for other people. When you’re on a losing team and you put up a zero, the only thing it really did that day was lower your E.R.A. and expand your value.

“But winning takes care of everything.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 31, 2014, on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: Angels Beat Deadline, With Weeks to Spare. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe